


Dungeons and Dragons and Dinner

by FlannelGuy51



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Bisexual Melvin Frohike, Domestic Fox Mulder/Dana Scully, Dungeons & Dragons Campaign, Established Fox Mulder/Dana Scully, F/M, Fluff, Gender Dysphoria, Sort Of, Spooky Squad plays dnd, Trans Character, Trans Fox Mulder, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-29
Updated: 2020-11-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:20:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27769678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FlannelGuy51/pseuds/FlannelGuy51
Summary: Even after fighting far-reaching government conspiracies, shapeshifting aliens, and an eight-year crush on his partner at the FBI, Fox Mulder still wasn’t strong enough to beat his dysphoria every day. It got to him sometimes, even after getting top surgery and being twenty plus years on T. Luckily, he didn’t have to go it alone anymore.OR: Mulder is feeling a little dysphoric and Scully knows just how to take his mind off of it.
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Comments: 1
Kudos: 11
Collections: Trans Mulder Literary Universe





	Dungeons and Dragons and Dinner

**Author's Note:**

  * For [salvabon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/salvabon/gifts).



> HAPPY BIRTHDAY MACK! These pasts few months of knowing you have been incredible, and I'm so blessed to have met you. My life is genuinely so much better with you in it, so what better way to celebrate than with a little of what helped us to meet?
> 
> To everyone else reading this: Please enjoy some MSR fluff with the rest of the squad and some Dungeons and Dragons.

Even after fighting far-reaching government conspiracies, shapeshifting aliens, and an eight-year crush on his partner at the FBI, Fox Mulder still wasn’t strong enough to beat his dysphoria every day. It got to him sometimes, even after getting top surgery and being twenty plus years on T. Luckily, he didn’t have to go it alone anymore.

Mulder stared at the poster on the wall of his office, absentmindedly chewing on a pencil. The familiar feeling of a thousand rubber bands squeezing around his head was distracting him from getting any work done. It wasn’t a headache exactly, more like tons of frustration and self-hatred piling up until he could hardly stand it anymore. On days like today, he couldn’t even pinpoint what exactly he was feeling dysphoric about. Mulder could never decide if these kinds of days were worse or better than the ones where he had a part of his body he could blame.

“Mulder?” Scully asked, typing on a computer behind her desk (she had one of those now). “Are you alright?”

Mulder suspected that she knew the answer already. Scully was so good at reading him that he often wondered whether or not she was hiding any psychic abilities.

“I’m fine,” Mulder replied, putting on a smile.

“Mulder.”

How could Scully say so much only by using his name?

Mulder sighed. “So maybe dysphoria has got me today, but really, Scully, it’s nothing I can’t handle.”

“You know, there’s nothing wrong with accepting a little affection once in a while.”

“Scully, I am  _ always  _ accepting affection.”

Scully crossed her arms and gave him a look. “Like when I tried to take care of you when you were sick last month?”

Mulder scoffed. “That doesn’t count! I don’t take sick days.”

“You’re proving my point, you know,” Scully said, smirking and turning back to her computer.

Mulder closed his eyes and rested his head in his hands. “I know.”   
  
“Sorry, what was that?”

“You want to go?” Scully looked at him, completely unamused, and he coughed, trying not to smile. “Go...go get me a chocolate bar from the vending machine?”

“Oh, so you can’t answer me when I’m checking in on your mental health, but all of a sudden when you want food you can allow me to take care of you?”

“Scully,” he whined. She was just giving him a hard time and he knew it. Still, no fair. “Please?”

Scully sighed and got up, walking to the door. On her way there, she paused, kissing Mulder on the forehead. “You look handsome today.”

Warmth bloomed in his chest and he felt a rush of euphoria. “Thanks.”

While Scully was gone, Mulder tried very hard to focus on the report he was meant to turn in by Friday morning. Details of the case drifted through his mind: snakeman, venom, three shots fired, two dead, fender bender, one phone lost, “unsolved”. He winced at the thought of Skinner’s complaining about overspending. Mulder hadn’t meant to jump into the lake and swim after a suspect with his phone in his pocket, he’d just...forgotten to take it out.

The harder Mulder tried to concentrate, the more upset he became. His hands looked too small, too feminine, and he hated the way that they moved across the keyboard. His packer was slightly out of place in his pants, reminding him mockingly of what he didn’t have. Even his hair felt wrong, the bangs he could see out of the corner of his eye. Did his hair look too feminine today? As he tried to check the computer screen reflection and find out, Scully opened the office door.

Mulder groaned. “Alright, so maybe I feel worse than I thought.”

Scully gave him a sympathetic smile and placed three candy bars in front of him. “Thought so. Anything I can do to help?”

“Your company is enough, Scully,” Mulder said with a small smile and opened a candy bar.

Scully rolled her eyes. “That was... _ incredibly _ cheesy, but since you’re having such a bad day, I’ll let it slide.”   
  
“How very kind of you. Actually, now that I think about it, would you mind helping me with this case report? I could use your perspective on a couple things.” It was only 70% an excuse to be closer with Scully. He didn’t say anything when she pulled up a chair far closer to him than necessary to see the computer screen, and she didn’t say anything when he grasped for her hand and visibly relaxed when she held onto it. They just worked on the report, neither acknowledging that they were accomplishing things at a much slower rate than usual.

When it was finally time to leave, Scully drove. They only took one car these days, as they were both going to and coming from the same place. Mulder had been more than happy to move out of his apartment and into Scully’s. His had never been very nice anyway, and her apartment had...well,  _ her. _

Somehow, Mulder’s dysphoria had managed to get even worse as the day went on. He would need some kind of miracle-distractor to make it go away.

As Scully unlocked the door, Mulder shifted from foot to foot. His self-deprecating thoughts were running wild and he just needed a nice environment full of people and--

“Finally!”

Scully pushed open the door to reveal The Lone Gunmen, Doggett, and Reyes sitting at their dinner table. Pieces of paper, pencils, dice, and a reference map were spread out before them, and some bottles of wine and bags of chips were already open and being consumed.

Mulder gaped and looked at Scully, who was just grinning.

“I thought a little Dungeons and Dragons while we ate dinner might cheer you up,” Scully said.

Mulder couldn’t help but grin himself. “Have I told you I love you?”

“You might’ve mentioned it.”

He kissed her then, because he could do that now. God, he must’ve been the luckiest guy in the world.

“We’re still here!” Langly called, his tone laced with disgust. Mulder could hear Byers whisper something back and pulled away from Scully, still smiling at her. “I’ve been working on this campaign all day.”

“Okay, okay, we’re coming.” Mulder sat down at the table between Scully and Doggett. He watched with amusement as the man on his right seemed desperate to figure out the character sheet he was holding. “Need a hand?”

Doggett hardly seemed to notice. “What the hell is arcana?”

“It’s knowledge related to magic,” Reyes answered easily. Doggett gave her a look. “So I played a little D&D in college.”

“It’s all Greek to me,” Doggett muttered. “Personality traits?”   
  
“You need to develop your character,” Byers explained. “For example, I’m Beizumin the Brave. I’m an elf, and my backstory is that my evil father tried to kill me and my sisters so I attacked him and took over our kingdom. I’m now on a quest to expand our alliances, and my sister is running the kingdom in my stead.”

“Have you ever played a character that  _ doesn’t  _ hate his dad?” Frohike asked.

“Have  _ you _ ever played a character that doesn’t fuck everything that moves?” Byers shot back. Frohike said nothing. “Anyway, you need to develop your character.”

“Byers, I don’t even  _ have  _ a character. I’m known for my lack of imagination, maybe this isn’t the game for me and I should just watch.”

“Come on, Doggett, you came all the way here,” Scully said. “You have to play. Here, I’ll help you make a character. Now, what class are you?”

As Scully and Doggett pondered over what sort of alignment Doggett wanted his rogue to be, there was a knock at the door. Wordlessly, Mulder and Scully came to an agreement that Mulder should answer it. He opened the door and smiled when he saw who it was.

“Skinner?” Mulder said incredulously.

“Good evening, Mulder,” Skinner greeted, smiling back. “I brought pizza!”

“You really think of everything, don’t you, Skinman?”   


Skinner groaned as he walked in and Mulder shut the door. “Don’t call me that. Hey, everyone!”

Once everyone was situated with food and their characters, Langly started the campaign.

“You wake up on a dock,” he began. “You’re surrounded by tons of little creatures, half-dog, half-fish. Small groups of them are swimming in the ocean around you, but most of them are on land in front of you. To your left on the dock, an old dog-fish is speaking to a small crowd of young dog-fish and people of other species. Past the dock, there’s a market where most of the dog-fish are. There seem to be three main shops that the dog-fish are gravitating towards, as well as a brothel. Beizumin, you may begin.”

Byers did the smart thing and went to listen to the old dog-fish, who explained that there was a creature haunting the woods surrounding the island of the dog-fish and preventing them from leaving. Scully took her turn next, interrogating a few locals on what their lives were like in the town. Mulder bought armor, Skinner bought a longsword, and Reyes bought some antivenom.

“I’d like to enter the brothel,” Frohike said when it was his turn.

Everyone groaned.

“You enter the brothel,” Langly said in a deadpan tone. “There are sex workers of all genders and species here, but most prevalent among them are dog-fish.”

“I want to roll to seduce a male dogfish,” Frohike said, grinning.

“Seduce?!” Langly said exasperatedly. “They’ll fuck you if you pay them, you moron, why don’t you just do that?!”   
  
“There’s no fun in that, Langly,” Frohike replied. “I’d like to seduce a dog-fish, please.”

Langly put his head in his hands. “Roll.”

Frohike proceeded to roll a one. “Fuck.”

Suddenly, Langly was full of energy. “You approach a male dog-fish. He is, perhaps, the most attractive person of any species you’ve ever seen. He’s the man of your dreams, in fact. Luckily, he’s also incredibly stupid. You could say practically  _ anything  _ and he would still have sex with you.”

“Would you get on with it already?” Frohike asked, head on the table.

“Hey,  _ I’m  _ the DM here. So this himbo dog-fish is looking at you, and you suddenly start rattling off how much you hate this island. You hate the location, and the people, and the smell. The smell is what you go off about the most, you say it just  _ reeks  _ here and fish is the worst smell to you in the world. Out of nowhere, you feel the urge to sing a Barry Manilow song. Perhaps somewhere in your small brain, you think it’s romantic enough to suit the moment. Unfortunately, on top of how upset this dog-fish is that you insulted his entire homeland, Barry Manilow is also absolutely anathema to this species. They might as well be allergic to his music with how much they despise it.”

“You just made that up!” Frohike complained.

“Big strong himbo dog-fish picks you up and tosses you out of the brothel,” Langly continued without pause. “Into a pile of mud. Somehow the mud is also full of broken glass. Minus 3 hit points.”

“I fucking hate you,” Frohike muttered, erasing his current hit points number and replacing it with one three fewer.

Everyone was laughing as Langly indicated that it was Doggett’s turn to go. The agent proceeded to buy a potion without even asking what it was.

“I can ask?” Doggett replied to Reyes’s annoyed outburst.

“Of course you can ask!” she said. “Why wouldn’t you be able to ask?”

Slowly but surely, Doggett  _ did _ start to make sensible choices. Scully managed to deduce that they were up against a dragon before they even entered the forest, and Reyes adopted her own owlbear as they went along. Mulder got the chance to save Frohike from a Green Hag (it was validating to be a hero for a moment), and Skinner was forced to heal them both after they went after a Giant Spider alone.

Everyone was impressed to see Doggett taking a lead in the final fight against the dragon, and excited to watch his strategy unfold. Hardly anyone (save Byers due to his kind offer to be the bait) was injured, and everything went exceptionally well.

“You did it, John!” Monica exclaimed when the battle was over. “You used your creativity to save us!”

“Oh, can it,” Doggett said, grinning. “I’m not  _ that _ unimaginative. This was...fun.”

“Thanks!” Langly said. “I didn’t have much time to put it together, but as always, you guys did things with it I didn’t expect and made it even more fun.”

“Thank you for coming, you guys,” Mulder said. “Today was pretty bad, but now, I’m hardly feeling crappy at all.”   
  
“Glad to hear it,” Byers said. “By the way, your suit is looking especially sharp today.”

Scully waved everyone out as Mulder watched, smiling to himself from the pure joy he was overwhelmed with at the moment. He never thought he’d be lucky enough to have a family like this.

When everyone was gone, Scully wrapped him in a hug. “I’m glad you had fun.”   
  
“Thank you for doing this, Scully,” Mulder said, trying not to let the happy tears brimming in his eyes spill over. “It was so thoughtful, and just--”

“I love you, too,” Scully said.

Mulder wasn’t ashamed to say he shed a tear or two at that. “Movie?”

“Yes. What are you thinking?”   
  
“ _ The Princess Bride _ ?”

“God, you really are cheesy today.”   
  
“What can I say? I’m a hopeless romantic.”

“Maybe not entirely hopeless.”

Dysphoria didn’t even cross Mulder’s mind as Scully laid her head on his chest and the film began.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope this was everything you wanted Mack :) Very happy to add this to the Trans Mulder Literary Universe! Thanks for reading!


End file.
